[No, not an invitation to be rude in the comments]

Out of the hot and heavy discussion of whether “catty” is a good translation of 斤 (jīn, which means half a kilogram), from the post a couple of days ago, talk in the Sinoglot lounge took a turn towards defining a whole category of catty words. To paraphrase Sima:

A “catty” word would be an English translation of a term that is in everyday use in China. In order to qualify as “catty”, though, the English word must be one so obscure that virtually no significantly-sized group of native speakers has heard of it.

The lounge consensus is that there has to be a lot of these words. An example that might qualify comes from a discussion long ago on Beijing Sounds: 莴笋 (wōsǔn). This is a common vegetable in China (Google images). It’s English name in the ABC Dictionary is “asparagus lettuce”, but it also appears to have been given a portmanteau of its own: “celtuce” from celery + lettuce.

Now it may be that there’s some large region of English speakers that does eat large quantities of celtuce and calls it such, which I guess would disqualify it as a catty word. But around the lounge, there’s no doubt that vegetables in general will be a productive category for catty words, along with fruits, various food products, and measurements.

Got a candidate for catty word of the year? Put it in the comments. (This is one of those moments it would be cool to have a Quora-like comment rating system…)

Winner of the contest is sure to receive free drinks of choice, served around the Sinoglot lounge pool table…

Honorable mention will go to the individual who can find the catty word for 白酒 that Sima is convinced he once saw but cannot now recollect.

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PS: This contest leaves behind the very intense debate (still in progress on the original catty post) over whether catty terms should be used in translations or not. Personally, I lean to the “not” side most of the time but can see arguments for including them in some instances.

I’m all in favor of using study of a non-native language to learn more about one’s native language. And it’s mildly interesting to learn, as I go through the “Pronouns, Pronominals and Pro-words” section of my new Chinese grammar book, that a catty is (OED)

A weight used in China and the Eastern Archipelago, equal to 16 taels, i.e. 11/ 3 lb. avoird., or 625 grammes.

But what possesses the writer(s) of a Chinese grammar to use catty as a translation for 斤 (jīn = 0.5kg, so 1.1 pounds)? It’s not as if 斤 is only found in ancient alchemist recipes. You buy pork belly by the jin for crying out loud! Continue reading

A few weeks ago when I asked about gěrpì, it took Sinoglot readers all of a few minutes to come up with the dictionary entry that had eluded me. From the comments in that entry I’ll first quote Jeroen’s response:

嗝儿屁[-兒-] gěrpì v.o. 〈slang〉 die; be dead

and then Julen’s comment:

etymology: from ass belching, something people do when they die.

Brendan also noted the phrase is in current (ironic) usage not just among kids.

Now the question is: what would be a better translation of that phrase that inspired the title of the original post: “Grandma’s going to murder me if she finds out”? Continue reading

A week or so back, Victor Mair posted at Language Log under the title of Google me with a fire spoon. It’s all about the problems of machine translation. The post grabbed my attention because I love fire spoons.

In case you’re not familiar with 火勺 (huǒsháo), this is what they typically look like: Continue reading

Regardless of your Mandarin level, inevitably you find yourself approached by a good friend to help “fix up” a translation from said language into, most often, English.

Do it! Don’t dither on the basis of your lack of familiarity with the terminology of thoracic surgery, with the procedures of analysis, with the conventions of medical journal writing. Dithering is for losers. You don’t think the original (paid) translator dithered, do you? Nah. He took the job and rendered 无皮下捻发感 as “no sense of subcutaneous hair-twirling”, maybe even with a straight face.

You’re not getting paid, and you’re waaaay outside your comfort zone. But at least, as a friend, you can help find a medical translation reference* with something slightly more plausible, say: subcutaneous crepitus.

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* Here it is, for the record. To describe the interface as “user-unfriendly” is like describing quantum mechanics as “unintuitive”

You might remember the discussion we had last year about the peculiar usage of the exclamation “!” and other punctuation marks in modern mandarin. I bring this up again because in yesterday’s news there was a remarkable piece of writing that illustrates the phenomenon.  Interesting too because the author is an admired member of the internet elite, speaker of English and used to working with foreigners: none other than Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba empire.

You can read all about it in this Forbes blog post. To make a long story short: Mr. Ma was slightly annoyed when he found that dozens of his employees were using the company to collude with outside swindlers, and he wrote a circular letter containing, in its Chinese original:

- 11 periods
- 21 exclamation marks.

In the first half of the letter it is even more pronounced, with a total of 12 exclamations for only 4 periods, and then those 4 look like they’ve been forgotten there  at the end of the paragraphs. Continue reading

Remember the question Sima brought up about how much surface area was needed to communicate equivalent amounts in Chinese vs English?

Looking back through that article and the comments, I’d conclude the following:

1. For unpearly prose at any rate, the surface area needed is probably about the same between the two languages.
2. It still might be the case that non-prose signs (e.g. a sign with succinct phrases or just a word or two) could be shorter in Chinese than English
3. “Native readers” of Language A can read Language A from a greater distance than they can a non-native Language B (whether A = Chinese or A = English)

All this came to mind at the Xiamen Botanical Gardens (also mentioned here) when I saw the sign below*:

Continue reading

The following is a guest post by Julen of ChinaYouRen

I saw this in Nanjing over the weekend and I thought it might be sinoglot worthy (since my own blog is mysteriously inaccessible these days).

It’s a remarkable double mistranslation effort in a tourist sign. The object are these balls that the Nanjing wall defenders employed to crunch the bones of the occasional visiting horde:

Continue reading

The Chinese writing system is incredibly efficient, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a pain to learn and we all forget how to write the odd character from time to time, but you can cram so much into such a small space. It’s not just things like the Analects which, in translation, require lines of English to represent the briefest of the sage’s utterances; even making simple arrangements by SMS/text message seems so much more convenient in Chinese.

Then, as Bryan pointed out, there are signs in your local hospital which protrude unreasonably far, simply so that they can helpfully accommodate the English translation.

Watch out. That thing could take your eye out! Continue reading

Killing time on the way to the train station the other day, a friend and I stopped into McDonald’s for coffee that was cheaper than that of the Starbuck’s next door. Thinking they may have wifi, I pulled out my iPod to find not one but three wireless networks all linked to McDonald’s. Excellent, I thought, this should be quick.

Here’s a shot of the main page.

Continue reading